I shan’t read the Alistair MacLean novel, Breakheart Pass, but I found satisfying his screenplay for the Tom Gries-directed 1975 film. It’s an 1800s action movie which is more of a murder mystery than a Western (rather un-transporting as it is), starring Charles Bronson in an interesting role. Reprobate whites join reprobate Indians in a homicidal scheme for gain. Few here possess a conscience. There is some exemplary moving train action, along with suspenseful scenes of violence. And very attractive outdoor shots. In the Seventies, filmmakers could make good—and non-sensationalistic—entertainments if they put their minds to it.
A goodly number of critics liked Steven Soderbergh‘s Presence (2024), but why did a lot of them pan it? Written by David Koepp, it’s a mainly agreeable spook tale with nifty shooting and editing by Soderbergh and some fine acting. A worried but giving ghost, or spirit, is in the new home of a married couple with two kids. Dad—Chris Sullivan—hires a woman with an extra sense who is not a psychic (mysteries abound here) to discover what’s going on. The failure of death to prevent a spiritual or supernatural existence is a theme in the film, as is familial near-despair. The denouement is weak but Presence as a whole is recommendable.
(Does Lucy Liu get a comeuppance?)
The Nutty Professor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The “inner man” Prof. Julius Kelp releases from himself through chemical means is the rude, unspeakably conceited Buddy Love—not a good inner man. Julius, a college chemistry teacher, fails to realize this, and never expects Stella (Stella Stevens) to fall for him. We don’t expect it either; he’s a nutty professor—played with farcical adroitness by Jerry Lewis in the Lewis classic, The Nutty Professor (1963).
However, the movie ends on a dandy note by having Julius and Stella walk off to get married as Stella, unknown to her fiance, bears on her belt two bottles of the weird chemical that turned Julius into masculine Buddy. Sincerely wanting the qualities of Prof. Kelp, she also wants, I would say,—for Julius—some of the qualities of Buddy Love.
Lewis’s film is a sassy, leisurely, corny delight—with “some scenes that can hold their own with the classic silent comedies” (Pauline Kael). One such scene contains a tracking shot of people on the street looking astonished at an unseen, very, very cool Buddy. Another shows, in a flashback, Julius’s darkly, grimly funny parents while goofy baby Julius is in a nearby playpen. . . Stella Stevens fills the bill as the lady-love, and is youthfully beautiful. Del Moore, as the college president, and Howard Morris, as the professor’s father, are successful as well, hilariously right.
In ’63, The Nutty Professor may have been the best American comedy since Pillow Talk.
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If it is a Christian who is baptized (excluding the infants), the baby donkey baptized by children in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is a Christian—or, rather, a “Christian.” He is a “Christian” in the sense of a suffering servant—“an epitome of passive suffering,” says Vernon Young. He is frightened and scorned and abused by men, while, on the other hand, a girl named Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) loves him as a pet. But Balthazar, the donkey, is removed from Marie, and Marie—virtually the Mary Magdalene of the film—removes herself from respectable company. Not only does she love the vile hoodlum Gerard (Francois Lafarge), she also resorts to prostitution. Balthazar must live with the earthy, earthly reality. Marie chooses to live with, to embrace, the worldly.
Its flaws keep Au Hasard Balthazar (At Random, Balthazar) from being as powerful as it could be. All the same, it manages to be one of the good movies of Robert Bresson (unlike those he made in the Seventies), a profound Christian opus acknowledging that there is Christological truth in the natural world. It also conveys that the sufferer is superior to the sinner, albeit Marie too, after sinning, suffers.
(In French with English subtitles)
A Mike Leigh film about a black lower middle-class family in London, Hard Truths (2024) shows us not that the world is too much with us but that we ourselves are too much with us. Pansy Deacon (a remarkable Marianne Jean-Baptiste) never ceases to be frustrated and bitter and has no idea why—why she can never enjoy life. She forces her husband Curtley (David Webber) to be too much with himself: a man paralyzed by his wife and in his misery. It is much the same with their shy son Moses.
The picture flows naturalistically without a plot (but you won’t miss it) and unconcerned about race. Armond White has correctly observed that the film “goes so far beyond the ‘people-who-look-like-me’ cliches that the emotional specificity of [Pansy’s] familial and social distress is scarily recognizable—and universal.” Which is another way of saying Leigh is an artist.
Kudos to his cast. Michelle Austin gives a sinewy and moving performance as Pansy’s sister Chantelle. A nice vitality arises when Austin is with the two young women who play Chantelle’s daughters—and Ani Nelson (Kayla) is lovely. In all likelihood, this is one of Leigh’s best films.